Sunday: 3 May 2015

For the first time in nine years I missed a Month of. That was the Month of March, in which a hard drive failed. At the time I actually had much of March written and analyzed, and though I had excellent backup that saved an enormous amount of data in the form of photos, personal observations of all sorts, and writing in general, getting all the infrastructure reconstructed was a bit overwhelming.

But the repair work is done now, there's a fresh terabyte hard drive in place, and it's just in time for The Month of April, Number 110 in a series that would have been 111. I'll include a few March observations that were particularly interesting.

In April, we were warm and wet, and we set some records - how about you?

Click on the image for the high and low anomaly graphic on a new page:

As was especially true for us, most of the US was warmer than usual in April. California received little break in the relentless warmer temperatures. The Gulf Coast and points inland were quite a bit warmer than usual. New England, the northwest Pacific states, and odd little concentrations in the West were quite a bit cooler than usual, but that was about it.

For most of the southern half of the US, the lows were quite a bit higher than the highs were high (click on above image for max and min temperature anomalies). This was especially true for the Southeast - much warmer nights than usual.

I'll include the mean temperature anomaly for March below, because it was so extreme overall. The entire western half of the country was much warmer than usual, more than 8F higher in many places. So April could be viewed as somewhat of a relief after all. New England was much colder than normal in March, so the same could be for it in April.

Precipitation: the closest I can find to the old familiar anomaly map is accessible from here. It's still much less flexible but at least looks a little more like a precipitation map should.

Most of the US east of the Rockies received normal to above normal rain in April, but certainly the northern plains states of the Dakotas and Minnesota were exceptional in their dry conditions. The Western states received little relief in the form of precipitation in April, continuing an even more horrific deficit from March:

For the Athens, GA area:

Below is my usual daily rain/temperature plot visualizing the changes in temperatures and precipitation. The spiky lines are temperatures recorded roughly ten times a day, and the lighter blue columns are Wolfskin rainfall measurements. The black line is the 30-year average daily temperature, which is now slowly but steadily moving upward.

As was true elsewhere in the East, temperatures ran warm during much of April. Even our lows were mostly above the overall average in most of the first 3 weeks of April. There was plentiful rain, with two events in particular, April 4-5 and April 15-17 leading to strong frontal changes in temperature.

If you just looked at our mean high April temperature in Athens, you might have yawned at our mere 1.4F anomaly above the 74.0F average high. It's just that our mean low temperatures were 5.3F above the normal 49.3. And in the end the mean temperature for April was 65.1, 3.4F above normal.

We broke one high record, with 89F on April 8. That was 1F higher than 88F recorded in 1919.

We had six days that were more than 1 standard deviation above normal highs (five such days is normal for April, so that's not significant). But we had only two nights significantly below normal lows, compared the usual 5.4 such nights in April.

The monthly histogram, which shows the breakdown of high and low temperature range counts from April 1948-present, confirms all this. The error bars are just plus/minus one standard deviation, which I arbitrarily set as the limits outside of which are "significantly" anomalous.

In the HIGHS half, we clearly have a significant number of slightly warmer than average vents in the 70's, stolen significantly from the cooler ranges.

It's in the LOWS half that you see so clearly that we had many more warm nights above 50, with significantly fewer nights in all ranges below 50. This is probably due to the many days of rain that we had in April.

Our mean low of 54.7 was the third highest mean low for April since 1920 - only in 2002 and 1981 was there a mean low of 54.8F, practically inconsequentially higher.

Below is the monthly accumulation of rain in Athens, GA. The river of peach is the long term standard deviation of all the daily black dots in the last 25 years, and the red line is the daily cumulative average. We're the green line this year, and for almost half the month it rose way above with that surplus of blue above the one standard deviation mark.

Normal rainfall for April in Athens is 3.15". This April, Athens ended up with 8.01", and we in Wolfskin had 6.40". The Athens figure turns out to be the fifth highest rainfall since 1920. The highest April rainfall was 11.6" in 1936, so we weren't anywhere near that.

April has shown the most change in rainfall in the last 100 years, more than any other month here. The 30-year standard for comparison (1981-2010) is 3.15"; but the average since 1920 is 3.94". That's a pretty significant change in rainfall pattern.

Prognosticator stuff:

What is the prognosticator telling us (as of early May)? And I'm going to limit this to the Southeast, since it's complicated this time. Take a look for yourself for your particular location.

Temperatures: Much hotter for the next two weeks, grading into normal over the remaining three months (MJJ). OK, for California, greater chances for warmer temperatures over the next three months.

Precipitation: For us in the Southeast, equal to above normal chances for higher precipitation over the next three months (MJJ). California actually has pretty much the same prediction, so there's some good there.

I have mentioned before that much of the above seems to be pegged to expectations of ENSO developments - maybe too much, given the failure of an ENSO ocean-atmosphere connection developing last year. So let's look at that.

ENSO stuff:

The folks at CPC have a version of PDF or HTML that is much different from their previous presentations, but at least it's there and the link isn't broken.

Back in late March there were indications that an El Niño was developing, and now as of Apr 27, it appears that those conditions are now present. There is a 70% chance that El Niño conditions will continue through the summer, and a 60% chance for continuation through the autumn.

Monday: 9 March 2015

It's The Month of February, Number 109 in a series. If you were paying attention, you know it was cold, very cold, in the Eastern US. It was also warm, very warm, in the West. Yes, Senator Inhofe, you do get snowballs in the winter.

Click on the image for the high and low anomaly graphic on a new page:

The extremes between West and East intensified in February. Much of the East Southeast, South and Great Plains ran 7-8F colder than average, while much of the West was 5-10F warmer. The Northeast from the Great Lakes through New England was quite a bit colder than normal. Parts of the West and northern Midwest were as much as 8F above normal.

Precipitation: the closest I can find to the old familiar anomaly map is accessible from here. It's still much less flexible but at least looks a little more like a precipitation map should.

Again, drier conditions expanded their range for much of the US, with only parts of the Rocky states, Arizona, and New Mexico receiving above normal rainfall. There was a great deal of snow in the Northeast, of course, but either this didn't translate to sufficient liquid water measurements, or snow isn't included in the precipitation analysis. I'm inclined to the latter - surely Massachusetts should have shown considerable green.

For the Athens, GA area:

Below is my usual daily rain/temperature plot visualizing the changes in temperatures and precipitation. The spiky lines are temperatures recorded roughly ten times a day, and the lighter blue columns are Wolfskin rainfall measurements. The black line is the 30-year average daily temperature, which is now slowly but steadily moving upward.

As was true elsewhere in the East, temperatures ran cold during much of February. There may have 5 days with average temperatures, and as many with way below average temperatures. There were three periods of rainfall occurring at regular intervals during the month. Rain came in four periods, one at the beginning of the month, and the rest at regularly spaced intervals of 5-7 days. It was the third one that led to a very cold period of six days.

Twice we had the threat of a winter weather storm, but it amount to nothing. The second one came only as cold rain when the atmosphere warmed a couple of forbidding degrees.

So the mean February temperature in Athens was 40.3F, less than that in January and 7F below the normal average. On Feb 20, we broke the previous record of 18F when the temperature fell to 14F. This is maybe a little less significant than it appears, since that 14F, let along 18F, are not typically low lows for our winters here.

We had one day that was more than 1 standard deviation above normal highs (5 such days is normal for February). We had 10 nights significantly below normal lows, double the usual 5 such nights. All of this in balance supports the notion of a much cooler February for us.

The monthly histogram, which shows the breakdown of high and low temperature range counts from February 1948-present, confirms this. The error bars are just plus/minus one standard deviation, which I arbitrarily set as the limits outside of which are "significantly" anomalous.

The rough bell shape of each of the column sets moves as a unit to the cooler range, by roughly 10F. There were significantly greater numbers of <40F events in the HIGHS half of the histogram. Similarly there were greater numbers of cold events in the 21-30F and < =20F LOWS ranges (as well as fewer warm LOWS in the 41-50 range.

Below is the monthly accumulation of rain in Athens, GA. The river of peach is the long term standard deviation of all the daily black dots in the last 25 years, and the red line is the daily cumulative average. We're the green line this year, and for almost half the month it cradled that surplus of blue above the one standard deviation mark.

Normal rainfall for February in Athens is 4.49". This February Athens ended up with 3.99", and we in Wolfskin 4.91". Our here, we're just about average rainfall for the year so far (with Athens about an inch below). I was really bummed about the two failures for winter storms, and I suppose at this point that's it for the winter.

It predicted cooler than normal temperatures for the Southeast over February, and that certainly was the case. For us it suggests higher than normal temperatures over the next week or two, and then normal temps for the Spring months. The West continues to look grimly warmer over the next three months.

Precipitation: For us in the Southeast it predicted wetter than usual for February, and we were about average. It continues to predict wetter than usual for the next month, grading down to equal chances of above/below normal.

ENSO stuff:

The folks at CPC have a version of PDF or HTML that is much different from their previous presentations, but at least it's there and the link isn't broken.

As of Mar 9, ENSO neutral conditions over the last 32 months have come to an end, with a weak El Niño declared. The probability that it will continue through the northern hemisphere summer is 50-60%.

Thursday: 19 February 2015

Oliver Sacks, born 1933, neurologist and exemplar in many other disciplines, has a column today at the New York Times. Sweet piece of writing, and hits me like a ton of bricks. THe NYT being what it is, if that link goes behind a subscription wall, let me know and I'll summarize.

When I met Glenn in the late 70s, he had a subscription to The New Yorker, and we've retained that subscription all these years and even imparted it to others we thought might be interested. Oliver Sacks wrote quite a few articles for TNY over the years, and I've enjoyed every one. There was the fascinating article on "The Island of the Colorblind", the one on a field trip in NYC to find ferns and mosses ( Hunting Horsetails ), and many know of "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat," as well as "Awakenings," a book that became a movie with Robin Williams, whom he adored, and Robert de Niro.

Among all the other fascinating things about Oliver Sacks, he was unable to recognize faces, did I mention that? There's a word for it!

Saturday: 14 February 2015

Glenn and I have been inextricably involved with cats since we met, in 1978. This wasn't my plan, but it didn't take long for me to get sucked in. There was never any overarching ethical motivation at rescue. But the occasional stray wanders into your lives and decides to stay, or a kitten(s) need a home, and what results over 36 years are the 27 cats you see below.

We've got the years on top, along with our two long term residences, and the catties are listed along the side. Simple enough.

You can click on the image to get a more detailed, larger version in a new window.

We've averaged a population of seven or eight cats a year since 1979, ongoing of course. But since moving out here, the number has been more like ten at a time, peaking briefly in 2003-2004 at twelve. We're now down to five, so it's not like we're quitting cold turkey.

Most of the cats have come to us as adult strays. The light green cell that precedes the darker green bars indicates that, as well as an uncertainty in the cat's age.

We've never allowed any of our cats to have kittens, although two cats, Blackie and Twyla, came to us already furnished with two newborns each.

We hadn't had kittens since Gene, in 2003. I'd forgotten how much fun they were until Colon arrived in Sep 2013. He's been a delight, and amazingly sociable and non threatening to the other cats. In fact, he's taken a lot of heat off the other three by engaging the hyperactive Gene, who the other three fear and loathe. Both Colon and Gene are black and white tuxedos, and their multi daily wrestling matches are eye catching.

Along with all the fun and enjoyment eventually comes death. That price is hard to take, and there are several - Daphne in 2004 was a particularly awful death - that were devastating and still haunt me.

After we moved out here in 1991, we began planting them in the Kat Semetary, with a little ritual that has scarcely varied in 24 years. The population is now 17. This excludes the only two cats who disappeared without a trace, Mitzi in 2001 and Brat in 2005.

The longest lived cat is, of course, Violet, who died at age 22 last year. Her brother Beaumont lived to be 16, and Squit was at least 17. All have been featured periodically here since I started the blog in 2004.

Several cats came to us under unusual circumstances. In 2004, Urchin arrived, knocking on the door and coming in like he owned the place, heading straight for the cat food closet. He so resembled our other golden boy Bart that it took ten or fifteen minutes to realize that he wasn't Bart.

MeMeow (aka Killer), a strident and imperious female tortoiseshell. She was a Katrina rescue who was foisted upon us in 2005, and died in 2012. During those years she ran the house, refusing to allow any cat within two or three feet of her, but craving Glenn's and my attentions.

We took on Sophie, a maine coon, in 2009 when her elderly owners were mauled to death by a dog pack a few miles northeast of here. A huge cat, and the most gentle one we've ever had, she daily walks Glenn up to his truck when he leaves in the morning. It's her job, and she's at the door every morning to perform it.

Twyla arrived in 1990 pregnant, or so we thought. After taking her to the vet for shots and neutering if early enough, we were surprised to hear that she wasn't pregnant at all. Or at least anymore, as we discovered, when we heard weak kitten cries from under a couple of bags of leaves in the back yard. And that's how Daphne came to us and stayed for 14 years.

Inevitably there will be some who see all this as a rather pathetic surrogate for being real parents. Of course they are also the same who would have that role denied to us, so it's not too important to take them seriously. In fact, Glenn and I have discussed that possibility a couple of times over the years. As you can imagine, adoption and fostering would have been just about impossible for two gay men in Georgia, and though we may be under rating ourselves, neither of us especially felt that we would be good parenting material.

In the end, what we did do was to make 27 sentient lives more secure, and a lot longer and happier than they would otherwise have been. I'm good with that. They've helped to make our lives happy.

Woody Allen: How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.

Or as John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."

Monday: 9 February 2015

That's what all the anti same sex marriage people are saying today, in SC, FL, NC, and, for the first time this morning, my birth state of Alabama, where good people now are being able to be married. Georgia is their last hope, I'm afraid. That's what we all say about some knuckle dragging state next to us when we feel superior.

Unfortunately, it's my own knuckle dragging state of Georgia that will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, and it will probably only happen in June, assuming the US Supreme Court rules against our unconstitutional mini DOMA law. This year we will have to fill our three IRS tax forms, one for the fed, and then another for the fed, so that we can fill in the state form, in order to accommodate Georgia, who refuses to recognize our marital rights as recognized now by 37 states and the District of Columbia. Neither of us is afforded health insurance as a family, nor benefits in some policies, nor social security benefits, because of the state of Georgia.

Still, Congratulations to my third cousin Joe, in Bessemer AL, who married his husband two years ago in Washington DC. Glenn and I did the same thing last year on Jan 2, and it was a grand time for us. A better time was never had by me, you can be sure of that.

A week ago, on Feb 1, we celebrated our 36th anniversary together. Is it odd that our most important anniversary date would not be our wedding day? Maybe, but how do you pick an anniversary date when everyone around you has told you for three decades that you're invalid? The best you can!

And yes, I do take note of one or two sourpusses. Suck on it. You don't know what you're talking about.

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